Study of Healthy Cervical Spinal Cord Morphometrics Using SCT

Objective  To utilize Spinal Cord Toolbox (SCT) to measure the morphometric measures of healthy cervical spinal cords and explore the impact of gender, age and vertebral levels on them.

Methods  As a retrospective study, magnetic resonance images of one hundred and eighty-four healthy adults were included and postprocessed. Then, cross-sectional area (CSA), eccentricity, anteroposterior diameter (AP) and right-left diameter (RL) were each computed for every subject. Then, impact of gender, age and vertebral level on CSA and eccentricity were explored. Moreover, linear correlation analysis was conducted among CSA, AP and RL.

Results  Male CSA is significantly larger than female CSA (P<0.05). For C2−C6, CSAs of younger and middle-aged group are both significantly larger than that of older group. CSA of C4 is the largest whereas CSA of C7 is the smallest. Eccentricity values of C4 and C5 are significantly larger than that of other vertebral levels. Linear correlation is established between CSA, AP and RL.

Conclusion The results allow for minimizing inter-subject variability using normalization, and thereby highlighting the importance of morphometrics as biomarkers in the research of cervical spinal lesion.